


a partner's footsteps

by narramin



Series: Promtober 2019 [3]
Category: One Piece
Genre: Angst, Chronic Pain, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, hey it's being sad about Kidd and Killer o'clock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-05
Updated: 2019-10-05
Packaged: 2020-12-01 21:00:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20897780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/narramin/pseuds/narramin
Summary: Bad days were when something, maybe weather too humid or too dry made his scars itch; it got him grumpy and irritable.The worst days had always started with Kidd being uncharacteristically quiet, save for barked, curt orders. And they always ended with him in the bottom of a bottle, pale and miserable.





	a partner's footsteps

**Author's Note:**

> All my thanks goes to Julia, [@shishiswordsman](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shishiswordsman/pseuds/shishiswordsman), for covering my ass where English grammar was kicking it, hard and painful.
> 
> Promtober day 4 - Blanket.

The whiskey had worn off.

Whatever was left in his bloodstream was only enough to drag his consciousness back to the harsh reality, to open gates for the throbbing, nauseating pain behind his temples. It pulsated in synch with another kind of pain, one he ignored, and the sharp ticks of a clock thrown somewhere in the corner of his cabin; a clock Kidd decided to get rid of as soon as he was able to stand up. _ Left corner, bottom shelf, _ its copper alloy sang to him, _no farther two meters away_. It might as well have been on the other side of the Red Line, in the safest safe of Marineford.

He was slumped over his desk, eyes scrunched shut, the rough, unpolished wood pressing into his cheek. If alcohol had blacked out his senses sudden and hard as it did sometimes, it’d leave an ugly mark. He didn’t care, but his hand twitched, unwitting, knocking over the bottle with a jarring _ clink _ in the silence. Some of the leftover whiskey splashed onto his fingers; the sticky, lukewarm drops tracing the little valleys and hills of his calloused hand; rough from metal work, slow and hypnotic. He wished he’d pass out again.

The whiskey had worn off. 

His arm didn’t hurt, he made himself think. It couldn’t hurt, because he had no arm left to hurt. 

Simple as that. Kidd was no doctor nor scientist, but he had never been a fool. The pain, naked and raw, curled inside him like an ugly snake, coiled to strike, and left room for little else in him. It felt real, radiating in waves to the point that he couldn’t move his upper body. He was half-convinced the throbbing pressure would push his insides out of his body; spill them out of him and leave them rotting on the floor. Tomorrow someone would find him on the floor covered in gore, and they’d cut him open and find nothing but the nest of buzzing agony inside his chest, shoulder, skull. He was so full of it.

There was something awfully tedious, yet completely surreal, about pain.

No limb, torn off close to 8 months now, with scars barely faded to a sick, unnatural shade of pink, should ache like that. Bone-deep, wearing him down piece by piece, tilting the room backwards on him. When he had lost it, screaming; that _ was _ real, sharp, so unlike what he felt now.

So, his arm didn’t hurt, he told himself. A nothing he self-medicated with whiskey. 

The floorboards outside his cabin creaked with familiar footsteps. 

There was a dull, quiet knock on the door, the knock of someone who didn’t expect an answer, but tried anyway. The keen of the door slowly creaking open cut the silence lingering in his badly lit, smoky space.

Kidd didn’t need to look up to see who’d entered — a lifetime of companionship had seared the sound of Killer’s footsteps into his very being. He thought vaguely, the room swaying around him, that he couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t known them, sure as his own. 

Not back in their village, running around on fields like little bastards or sneaking out together. Not even when their ship, _ Victoria Punk _ _ — _ named after a girl they both knew, an inside joke; because her name had been Victoria and she was a punk with an attitude Kidd expected his new ship to have — had been new, its wood shades lighter, full of foreign, strange creaks and sounds. Kidd remembered the first night they had spent on the Victoria, the whole crew tipsy and flushed in the humid night, and when Killer had come to his cabin with a bottle and a deck of cards, later that night, there was no need to look up then, either. 

Killer closed the door and moved towards him, steps as light and careful as a man of his size could make them, barely creaking the floor. It would have infuriated Kidd, if he was in one of his more self-pitying moods. But he only felt fatigue now, bone-deep, over the mundane throb radiating from the patch of empty air where his arm would have been, filling up the last empty nooks of his body. 

Killer sighed, making a beeline towards his bed, picking something up; it wasn’t the sharp trill of the metal on his body, that only Kidd was able to hear, that betrayed him; he needed no uncanny powers to know his partner.

Careful, steady hands laid a blanket over him, gentle enough not to hurt, not too gentle to hurt his ego. Kidd grunts, realising how cold he had been, goosebumps raising up on his skin, alerting Killer that he was awake without meaning to — but who was he kidding. Killer probably knew it to begin with.

\-----

“Captain,” Killer said, voice resonating through his mask; he came directly off night watch, so he hadn’t had the chance to stash it in his cabin. He’d only grabbed something from the kitchen on the way.

Kidd creaked an eye open. He looked like shit, pained, and clearly in the ditch between drunk and hungover. His messy hair and the empty bottle knocked over on its side on the desk before him didn’t help the picture. He was curled around his left arm; something Killer knew his captain hated catching himself doing; but sometimes pride can only get him so far. “Iller. What d’ you want.” 

Killer sat on the bed with a sigh, pack in hand. He was suddenly tired, his captain’s half-focused gaze on him. They’d been over this several times, the topic of Kidd visiting a doctor. The arguments scaled from angry dismissal to angry shouting to angry fights to hushed and miserable. 

Kidd claimed his arm was fine; Killer knew that he was lying. A simple equation, yet somehow tougher to solve than the Gordian knot. 

He opted for a half-truth. “Came to report in.” And to check on his captain.

Kidd groaned, again, and sat up somewhat straighter. The blanket remained on his shoulders; it had coins from their hometown on the South Blue sewn into its corners, so he didn’t need hands to keep it on. Every object in this room and on the Victoria was either made out of metal or had pieces of metal affixed to it, in it; small lengths of wires coiled on mugs’ handles, longer lengths hidden in the thick ropes keeping the sails stretched. Something like that came extremely handy when Grand Line played its tricks with the weather. There was no part of his ship Eustass Kidd couldn’t account for or weaponise. 

“Everything’s steady. No land in sight, not for another three days at least.” Then, because there was no point beating around the bush, not with Kidd’s gaze bleary from the drink and the pain, “How’s your arm, Captain?”

To his surprise Kidd didn’t immediately tell him to go and fuck himself, and then Heat and Wire too, while he was at it, but ran his fingers through his hair. Probably smearing something in it in the process, going by his scowl; or maybe that was just the pain he let surface on his face, this once. 

“Fuck,” he gritted through his teeth, “_ fuck. _” He blinked away, not looking at Killer. “How could it be anything? It’s not there. I’m not fucking crazy. I know it’s not there.” 

There was no mistaking; it was one of the worst days. Good days were when Kidd acted like he always had, cackling with manic energy as he built the rocket launcher they’d gotten off the black market into his metal arm, for no other reason than to chase away the boredom of the open sea. Bad days were when something, maybe weather too humid or too dry made his scars itch; it got him grumpy and irritable. The worst days had always started with Kidd being uncharacteristically quiet, save for barked, curt orders. And they always ended with him in the bottom of a bottle, pale and miserable.

Killer stood up, and didn’t tell him he wasn’t crazy. He didn’t tell him that they could at least get something more effective to kill the pain, that he couldn’t have been a unique case; that Brois’s grandfather, their old neighbour they had both feared as kids sometimes complained about his leg, the one he’d lost 35 years ago in a lumberjack accident, hurting. 

Bringing up the latter had been especially ugly, that one time that he had, so Killer only stepped behind his captain, pack in hand. 

“Lean forward.” 

Kidd shoot up straight, drunken confusion on his face. “What _ the fuck _ are you do-” then Killer pressed the heat pad, the one he had asked Wire, nodding off in the kitchen, to fill for him, to the spot between Kidd’s shoulder and scapula, where his muscles knotted up the worst. Kidd’s protest turned into groan, half pain and relief, surprised. 

A full body shudder ran through him, chattering his teeth as though he was cold, his eyes scrunched shut. He slowly leaned back towards the desk, resting his forehead against it with a low thud. Killer’s hands kept the heat pad steady on his shoulder. His breathing first became more strained, gritted through his teeth, but he didn’t try and shake his first mate’s hands off or tell him to stop. 

After a few minutes, the rhythm of his breathing first slowed down, deeper and easier, synching with Killer’s own. They stayed like this, breathing together, for what felt like minutes to Killer; probably more to Kidd, who was finally out of the pain’s grip for what was probably the first time in a day. Then, even later, his breathing completely relaxed, became slow and steady; he had this characteristic break between his exhales and inhales only in one case.

He’d fallen back asleep. 

Killer let the pad go, careful not to push the blanket off his captain. The pad stayed in the hollow of Kidd’s shoulder and back, stable and still steadily radiating warmth. Not likely to fall off soon; Kidd had slept like the dead ever since they were kids, motionless like a piece of wood. 

Killer backed away, and took a good, hard look at him, honest, as a first mate now. Kidd definitely looked better than half an hour ago; still pale, and he’d definitely nurse a bad hangover tomorrow, but his eyes were not as sunken, pain lines less prevalent on his face. He finally looked his age again. 

That was what Killer had come for. 

He slowly closed the door behind him, with a click barely audible in the hull of the dark, sleepy ship.

**Author's Note:**

> Anyway [their backstory](https://rocketspurs.tumblr.com/post/183621160453) with the girl they become best friends through as kids is killing me. :)
> 
> As always, feedback is greatly appreciated!


End file.
